Apple: iMessage and Facetime are encrypted so we can't hand over info
Apple said iMessage and FaceTime conversations were protected by end-to-end encryption so no-one but the sender and receiver could see or read them. "Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers' location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form." ... the most common form of request came from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer's disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.

Lawmakers move to block black box recorders in cars, DVR snooping
"For me, this is a basic issue of privacy," Rep. Mike Capuano (D-MA) said in a statement. "Consumers should have control over the information collected by event data recorders in their own vehicles and they should be able to exercise control over the recording function. Many consumers aren't even aware that this technology is already in most vehicles."

Personal Touch-Identification Tokens
Touch-based personal tokens would let devices unobtrusively identify who is interacting with the device at any given time. Devices could then tailor services to users and control access to sensitive information and online services. The authors present an approach for using a wearable personal token, in the form of a ring, to send an identification code to devices through touch.

From 4GLs to HTML5 desktop apps: Bringing data to the masses
"Our relationship with data has changed," Jer Thorp, a New York-based artist, educator and data-engagement entrepreneur, told ... "Data triage is something we have to do every day," he said. In addition, the data coming at us today often is hard to understand. The trouble is that too much of it just "looks like numbers," Thorp mused.

Delivering Personalized Digital Experiences for Better User Engagement... Sweet!
Providing highly personal, memorable digital experiences, however, requires enrichment of content; specifically, auto-tagging, categorization and sentiment analysis. To achieve all three and ensure accuracy in real-time, this enrichment process must be automated. ... As the rate of content grows exponentially, so does the need to join content created in-house with third party content, such as affiliate partner feeds and social media.

Dev Watch 6/14: API Management Heats Up
Developer tool and platform vendors are kicking the summer off with a slew of product and partnership announcements. In particular, we've been hearing a lot from providers of tools for publishing, promoting and overseeing application programming interfaces (APIs). Here are some API management product notes that wouldn't fit into the main news feed we thought you shouldn't miss:

Virtualisation security: Where firms are falling down
"Often they will take their traditional security that they have for their physical environment and try and deploy that in their virtual one. As a result there's an impact on performance, because the traditional security is not designed for their virtual environment. It doesn't take into account how the virtual environment behaves and will leave security holes," Trend product manager James Walker said.

What Successful People do with the First Hour of Their Work Day
"If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Expectations of Risk Management Outpacing Capabilities – It’s Time For Action
This is the main finding of a large-scale study of risk conducted by KPMG International, based on a global survey of 1,092 C-level respondents that was deployed by the Economist Intelligence Unit in December 2012. The aim was to find out about executives' perceptions of the risks facing their companies and their sense of how, and how well, their companies and industries are tackling them.

Quote for the day:"It is better to look ahead & prepare than to look back & regret." -- Jackie Joyner-Kersee